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Euro area reform has been at the center of much needed discussions throughout recent years. The Euro area crisis has made it clear that significant vulnerabilities still exist in the current architecture of the European Monetary Union. This has opened an intellectual and policy debate on how to make the EMU more crisis-resilient and whether the Euro area requires more risk-sharing or more market discipline to this end. Along these lines, numerous proposals have been presented by institutions and academics such as the introduction of a common fiscal policy instrument, possible reforms of the current fiscal rules, the creation of a Euro area safe asset to break the sovereign-bank nexus and a common European Deposit Insurance Scheme. This policy brief summarises the discussions and policy proposals for EMU reform of recent years. After intensive debates, the necessary consensus was not found and no significant breakthrough on EMU reform has been achieved to reinforce the ability of the monetary union to withstand future crises. These intellectual discussions have however laid the ground-work for finding the right answers at the particular moment in the future when political compromises will make it feasible to strengthen the Euro area in a healthy and efficient manner.

This paper analyses the determinants of aggregate per-capita investments into the telecom sector. We provide results of panel econometric estimates for EU and OECD countries covering the period from 2005 to 2013. The findings show a positive effect of infrastructure-based competition between xDSL broadband and cable-TV broadband subscriptions on investments. We use cross-country variance in open access regulations to examine their effect on investments and find a negative effect for bitstream regulations. The regression results are used to assess the magnitude of these factors, thereby providing valuable inputs to the policy debate on broadband promotion.

Die österreichische Wirtschaft wuchs im Jahr 2018 weiterhin kräftig. Die sektorale Breite der Konjunktur spiegelt sich in einem robusten Beschäftigungswachstum und einem Rückgang der Zahl der Arbeitslosen. Regional zeigt sich jedoch ein durchaus heterogenes Bild, mit besonders kräftigem Wachstum in der Südregion.

Secularly declining GDP investment shares are often explained by the widespread fall in the relative price of investment goods. Granger non-causality tests applied to longer-term time series for a large number of industrial countries tend to reject that explanation.

We estimate a quantile structural vector autoregressive model for the Euro area to assess the real effects of uncertainty shocks in expansions and recessions using monthly data covering the period of February 1999 to May 2016. Domestic and foreign (US) uncertainty shocks hitting during recessions are found to produce a relatively overall stronger negative impact on output growth than in expansions, with US shocks having more pronounced effects. Inflation, in general, is unaffected from a statistical perspective. Our results tend to suggest that policy-makers need to implement state-dependent policies, with stimulous policies being more aggressive during recessions – something we see from our results in terms of stronger declines in the interest rate during bad times.

Profits that persist above or below the norm for prolonged periods of time reveal a lack of competition and imply a systematic misallocation of resources. Competition, if unimpeded, should restore profits to normal levels within a relatively short time frame. The dynamics of profits can thus reveal a great deal about the competitiveness of an economy. This paper estimates the persistence of profits across the European Union, which adds to our understanding of the competitiveness of 18 EU member countries. By using a sample of approximately 4,700 firms with 51,000 observations across the time period of 1995-2013, we find differences in the persistence of short-run profits, implying that there are differences in competitiveness across the EU. The Czech Republic and Greece are among the countries with the highest profit persistence, whereas the UK is among those with the lowest persistence of profits. Furthermore, we provide evidence that there are significant permanent rents present in the EU across countries as well as in the different broad sectors across the EU.

This paper analyses unemployment insurance schemes in the presence of mobile workers and trade unions at industry or country level that are capable of internalising the effect of wage demands on unemployment insurance contribution rates. We compare two types of existing unemployment insurance systems. When unemployment insurance is organised at trade union level (decentralized Ghent unemployment insurance), trade unions strategically lower the benefit levels of their unemployment insurance schemes to deter welfare recipients from other unions from entering their unemployment insurance scheme, leading to a race to the bottom in unemployment insurance provision. With centralised provision of unemployment insurance, by contrast, trade unions do not fully account for the cost of higher wages as mobility allows them to partially shift the burden of unemployment to other unemployment insurances. A system of coordinated unemployment insurance, combining a centrally set benefit level with decentralised funding as in Ghent unemployment insurance systems, can circumvent both the strategic benefit setting and the fiscal externality problems, thus reconciling the equity and efficiency aims in the design of unemployment insurance.